Markus Poschner & Bruckner Orchester Linz

Dancing liberation strokes

Not infrequently, the power of motor skills, of movement and especially of dance begins to have an effect where the possibilities of language reach their limits. Music history is not short of examples in which dances were used as rhythmic-percussive acts of inner or outer liberation. Leonard Bernstein, for example, thematised the conflict between two street gangs, the US-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, in the New York City of the 1950s in his still popular musical West Side Story, not least through the use of contrasting 'national' dances. In the third movement of her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Florence Price, another US composer who, as a black woman, fought against racist resentment throughout her life, took up the form of the Juba Dance developed in the 19th century by West African plantation workers in protest against slavery. The programme will be complemented by the world premiere of the concerto for saxophone quartet and orchestra written by the Russian composer Elena Firsova. Markus Poschner and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz will be joined by the sonic.art saxophone quartet, which is particularly renowned for its interpretation of contemporary music.